Disclaimer: I am not posting this to be provocative, but to hopefully have people think about it. Those who are prone to taking offense will take offense regardless, this is meant for everyone else.
According to Pew Research, which has been tracking this sort of thing for over 20 years, with the question "What do you think is more important – to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?"
It turns out that support for gun control among non-gun owners is the same as it was 20 years ago, while support for gun rights among non-gun owners is higher now than it was 20 years ago (the undecideds, decided). Similarly, support for gun rights is up for Democrats from 20 years ago, up for college grads, up for whites, up for blacks, up for parents, up for men, up for women, and up in the northeast, south, midwest and west. Even in polls taken right after Newtown, the general opinion was that the NRA does not have too much influence on gun laws and by a 4-3 margin believed that gun ownership does more to protect people from crime than it does to put people at risk (a result which is matched by CDC studies on the matter).
Part of this attitude might come from the fact that firearm murders are declining, and have been doing so all by themselves for many years without any extra gun control laws to explain it. Again, in terms of the raw statistics, if every "assault rifle" in the country disappeared overnight and never came back, the effect on firearm homicides would be so small that you might not be able to tell it from normal year-to-year variation. This makes it somewhat problematic to get the average person (gun owner or not) highly motivated about the issue.
You may not like these results and facts, but there they are. Believe what you wish, but if a national assault weapon ban did not pass a Democratic majority Senate in the wake of Newtown (60 voted against and 14 of them were Democrats), that is a pretty tangible sign about which way the politicians think the electoral winds blow.
The OP's linked story was written right before the 2014 mid-terms. Blaming the Democratic losses on "the other guys voted more" is a nice way of absolving yourself from, pun intended, shooting yourself in the foot. In the Colorado recall elections in 2013, two Democrats from Obama+20 districts were voted out of office on a gun control issue because Democrats went to the polls for the sole purpose of voting out other Democrats. Exit polls showed that for each 100 people who voted, 60 were Democrats. And the Democrats outspent Republicans by a 6 to 1 margin. And the Democrats still lost. And Colorado senator Mark Udall(D), who heavily supported the recalled legislators, lost his seat in the 2014 midterms, contributing to our wonderful new Republican majority Senate.
According to Nate Silver, about 30% of Democrats are gun owners, myself among them. Based on averages, not a single gun owner on DU is likely to have ever been involved in criminal violence with a firearm, nor caused harm to anyone else by accident or neglect, but I have yet to see several of DU's loudest refer to any gun owner here as anything other than a "gun nut", nor have I ever seen any gun control advocate here censure anyone for doing so. Even DU comments calling for or approving of violence against gun owners go unremarked, so it seems that this 30% of Democrats is "the enemy" and so any comment is acceptable.
I know that there are polite gun control advocates here at DU who have done their research and put a lot of thought into the issue, because I have had useful private discussions with them. But unfortunately, they are not the ones driving the public narrative and thus are not the ones that the public will see as the face of the issue. Is alienating 3 out of 10 Democrats a winning strategy for 2016?
As I said at the top of the message, it is something to think about.
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